September 15, 2014

Smart phone placebo

Forget about the iPhone 6. Dutch designer Ingmar Larsen has helped create a new phone that is shatterproof, battery-free and toilet-bowl resistant.

Sure, it doesn’t have all the fancy features of an iPhone — say, the ability to make and receive calls — but Larsen says it’s better. His product, dubbed the “NoPhone,” lets you actually communicate with people.

“Nowadays you see people staring at their mobile phone in social situations,” Larsen told The Washington Post. “They forget about the social contact, the things going on in the world.”

The NoPhone is an antidote to “smartphone addiction” (an epidemic severe enough to merit its own WebMD page). Manufactured via 3D printer to be the exact size and weight as an iPhone, the NoPhone operates as a kind of “smart phone placebo” — it has the comforting heft and feel of an Apple product, without the distracting e-mail notifications, Internet access and phone-call-making capabilities.

With the NoPhone, people can feel safe leaving their real phones at home, and the product’s sleek design saves them from that “unsettling feeling of flesh on flesh” when closing their hands.